From Empire to Utopia: The Effacement of Colonial Markings in Lost Horizon

At a recent international conference held in what might be called the heart of Europe, concerted efforts were made to examine certain powerful fantasies accruing around a particular Asian nation. “Mythos Tibet,” as the conference was called, ¹ was an attempt to question seriously the sources and the effects of the largely Western-manufactured but widely consumed fanciful image of the highland nation. On account of its particularly difficult condition as an “autonomous region” of the People’s Republic of China, Tibet has become a virtual nation of uncertain political status and, at the same time, something of a hyper-nation, as it is now believed by some people to be the very embodiment of, or if not quite that, the closest approximation to, a nationhood essentially predicated on a spiritual principle rather than on the usual base material reality of power; to repeat a phrase used by one of the speakers, it is considered a “dharma nation.”

Throughout the conference, the name Shangri-La rose to people’s lips freely and frequently, evidently as a convenient and fortuitously poetic nomenclature for the whole complex of fantasies surrounding (or constituting) the nation, that is, as an evocative name for the Tibet of Western imagination as opposed to something like the real Tibet. In short, here as elsewhere, Shangri-La functioned as a name for that famous Nowhere that has existed for some time in the Western and Western-influenced imagination ² —and in the imagination only—the mythic entity that today threatens to overpower and occlude the actual historical conditions of the Tibet problem. ³

As many participants of the conference were evidently aware, such a fantastically positive, idealized notion of a foreign society—which, for that very reason, is made to serve as a mirror image of, and possibly a panacea to, many of the ills of contemporary Western or Western-dominated nations—could be just as detrimental to the welfare of the people associated with these fantasies (Tibetans in this case) and ultimately just as irresponsible and offensive as the other, perhaps more familiar, thoroughly negative image of the non-West as benighted nations of despots, savages, and cannibals. Indeed, it seems all too obvious that the intense yearning for the snowy peaks of the Himalayas as the last preserve of a pristine civilization that can save the rest of the world from the havoc of modernity is but a logical complement to the equally intense aversion to the diabolical swamp imagined to be at the heart of Africa, “the Dark Continent.” The paired extremes at work here—height versus depth, dazzling light versus dismal darkness, transcendent wisdom versus utter perdition, and so forth—undoubtedly say something important about a certain type of colonialist psyche and its logic of othering, but they are practically useless, to be sure, as categories for representing the empirical reality of these foreign regions or their native inhabitants.

This essay, however, is not about Tibet but, rather, about the original, purely fictional Shangri-La, that is, about James Hilton’s novel Lost Horizon, from which the name originated. I should hasten to add, moreover, that my aim is not the assessment of a so-called literary representation of Tibet, of Asia, or of the non-West; for that matter, it is not a question of representation that I wish to raise. ⁴ My principal concern, rather, is a particular Orientalist regime of reading to which this novel has been habitually subjected or, perhaps more accurately, collusively allied. As countless works of literary criticism in the recent decades have shown compellingly and repeatedly, and as I hope the analysis that follows will demonstrate specifically, such a regime of reading cannot be considered either entirely external or strictly internal to the novel itself. ⁵ Indeed, if Lost Horizon warrants critical attention today, it is above all because of its unusually and conspicuously ideological reading—an incipient tradition of reading already indicated in the novel itself, so to speak—which renders this minor literary work an important cultural production despite the absence of a significant...